Nine Pen Names, an Academy, and a Lot of Experiments

Hello. Let me tell you who is talking.

I am a novelist. I write genre fiction under nine pen names, across romance and cozy fantasy and cozy mystery and a few corners of the internet I will get to eventually. I am a co-founder of the Future Fiction Academy, where I teach other authors how to work with these tools without handing over the parts of the job that make it worth doing. And I am, for lack of a better job title, an AI adventurer — which mostly means I try things before anyone has told me whether they work, and then I come back and tell you what happened.

That last part is what this blog is for.

The three hats, and why they matter together

Most people writing about AI and publishing have one of these hats. Very few have all three, and I think the combination is the only reason my opinions are worth anything.

The novelist hat means I have skin in the game. When I say a workflow produces flat prose, it is because I read the flat prose, in my own book, in a genre I know cold, and I had to fix it. I am not evaluating these tools as a hobby or a thought experiment. I am evaluating them against a backlist and a business and a reader who will notice if I get lazy.

The teacher hat means I cannot get away with hand-waving. When you teach something, you find out immediately which parts of your process you actually understand and which parts you were just doing on instinct. Every course I have built for the Academy has forced me to go back and take my own workflow apart to see how it really runs. That is uncomfortable and enormously useful, and a lot of what ends up here will be things I only understood because somebody asked me to explain it.

The adventurer hat is the one that gets me in trouble, and it is my favourite. I build things. I break things. I spend a weekend on an idea that turns out to be worthless, and a Tuesday night on one that changes how I work for a year. I go first. Going first means being wrong in public sometimes, and I have decided that is a fair price.

What I actually mean by AI-positive

The name of this site is a position, so let me be precise about it, because AI-positive gets read as two things I am not.

It does not mean I think AI writes books. It doesn’t. It cannot hold a story. It cannot want anything, and wanting something is most of what a novel is made of. Every book I publish is mine — the choices, the shape, the sentences that matter, the reason it exists at all.

It also does not mean I think everything is fine. There are real problems here. Real questions about training data and consent, real economic disruption for real people, real slop flooding real markets, and real authors frightened for good reasons rather than silly ones. I am not going to pretend those away to keep the vibes up.

What AI-positive means is this: I think these tools, used well, give working authors back the parts of the job that were quietly killing us — and I would rather be in the room helping figure out what “used well” looks like than outside it, arguing that the room should not exist.

I could never afford an assistant. I have one now. I could never afford a developmental editor on draft three, a brainstorming partner at two in the morning, a formatter, a spreadsheet, a research librarian, or a very patient person to talk me out of a plot hole.

Those were structural advantages that belonged to authors with money. Now they belong to anyone willing to learn the tools.

That is not a small thing. It is the most democratising shift my industry has seen since Kindle Direct Publishing, and I intend to be loud about it.

I also want more women in this conversation. I want more romance authors, more cozy authors, more people who write the genres that actually pay the bills and get sneered at anyway. Right now the AI-and-writing discourse is dominated by men with podcasts, many of whom do not have books on shelves. That is not a conspiracy, it is just who showed up first. So I am showing up, under my real name, with my real face on the About page, writing in pink.

What this blog is

It is a working notebook, published.

It is not a product I am building an audience for, and it is not a doorway into something I want to sell you. I have an academy for teaching and I have novels for selling, and this page does not need to do either of those jobs. It exists so the things I figure out stop dying quietly in my own folders.

Here is what I expect to end up writing about:

• Workflows that actually run. Not “here are ten prompts.” The whole shape of a process, what it costs, where it breaks, and what I had to change after it broke.
• Craft under pressure. What happens to pacing, voice, and continuity when part of your process is automated — and the specific ways I have learned to catch the damage before a reader does.
• The business. Nine pen names is an operations problem long before it is a creative one. Metadata, catalogues, launches, the unglamorous machinery.
• Things I built. I make my own tools, mostly at night, mostly because nothing on the market fit. I will show you the ones worth stealing and warn you off the ones that ate a month.
• Things that did not work. These are the posts I most want to write and the ones the internet has the fewest of.

What I am promising

Four things.

I will be specific. Real numbers, real file names, real quotes from the actual draft. Vague advice is free everywhere and worth what it costs.

I will tell you what it cost. Every workflow on this page will come with its price — in money, in hours, in the thing you have to give up to run it. Anyone showing you only the upside is selling you something.

I will be wrong, and I will say so. I have changed my mind about several things I said confidently a year ago, and I expect to change it again. When I do, I will write the update rather than quietly deleting the old post.

I will not tell you there is one right way. There isn’t. My setup is large and strange, it suits my particular business and my particular brain, and it is not a standard anyone should measure themselves against.

If you are writing beautiful books in a single chat window, you are not behind. You have found the tool that fits your work, which is the entire goal.

Come along

I have been doing this quietly for a while — building, breaking, teaching, taking notes I never showed anyone. This is me starting to show the notes.

If you write books and you are curious rather than certain, whichever direction your curiosity points, you are in the right place. Pull up a chair. Bring your questions. I will bring what I have learned this week, including the parts that went badly.

Let’s find out what these things can actually do.